Many of today's computing systems include computing resources that are not fully utilized. The owners of these systems often could benefit by increasing the utilization of these systems' computing resources.
A number of approaches could be adopted in order to increase utilization. Under a “consolidation” approach, the processes and data of multiple parties might be co-located on a single hardware unit in order to more fully utilize the resources of the hardware unit. Under the consolidation approach, multiple parties might share a single hardware unit's resources, including file systems, network connections, and memory structures. For example, multiple businesses might have separate websites that are hosted by the same server.
However, some of the parties might not know or trust each other. In some cases, some of the parties actually might be competitors with others of the parties. Under such circumstances, each party would want to ensure that its processes and data are shielded, or isolated, from access by other parties and those other parties' processes.
Mechanisms that would isolate one party's processes and data from other parties sharing the same hardware unit have been proposed. For example, a “jail” mechanism provides the ability to partition an operating system environment into a “non jailed” environment and one or more “jailed” environments. The jail mechanism allows users, processes, and data to be associated with a jailed environment. For example, one group of users, processes, and data may be associated with one jailed environment, and another group of users, processes, and data may be associated with another jailed environment. The jail mechanism restricts users and processes that are associated with a particular jailed environment from accessing processes and data that are associated with environments (both jailed and non-jailed) other than the particular jailed environment.
Some operating system environments provide an accounting mechanism that records, for each process that executes in the environment, information about the length of time that the process executed, and the identity of the user that executed the process. When a process exits, the accounting mechanism adds, to a log file, accounting information that corresponds to the process. This accounting information may be used for billing purposes. The act of recording accounting information is called system accounting.
As discussed above, an operating system environment may be partitioned into a non-jailed environment and one or more jailed environments. However, no previous system accounting approaches contemplated multiple partitions within an operating system environment. Because previous system accounting approaches did not contemplate a partitioned operating system environment, previous system accounting approaches lack features that would be useful to an administrator of a partitioned operating system environment as well as administrators of the partitions of a partitioned operating system environment.